Vasari mentions this Adoration as being in the Pucci house in 1568, and it turns up again in a Pucci household inventory taken in 1698^[1]. In 1720 it passed to the Guicciardini family as part of the dowry of Luisa Ninfa de' Pucci, and from there it moved through a succession of English collections before entering the National Gallery^[1]. Scholars date the painting to around 1472, with some placing it as late as 1476, and most agree it predates Botticelli's larger and more famous Adoration of the Magi now in the Uffizi^[1].

The painting was probably conceived as an independent small panel meant to be seen at close range and at eye level, rather than mounted high on a wall or altar^[1]. Seen this way, the unusually tall buildings in the background would appear to flatten out, while the large blocks of stone in the foreground would gain a stronger sense of depth and pictorial unity^[1]. Some scholars have read this deliberate distortion of scale as an early anticipation of anamorphic perspective, a technique of manipulating a composition so it resolves correctly only from a specific viewpoint, a device usually credited first to Leonardo da Vinci among Western artists^[1].

A young man in the foreground of the composition looks directly out at the viewer, breaking with the inward focus of the rest of the scene, and one early twentieth-century scholar proposed this figure as a self-portrait of Botticelli^[1]. The painting also shows signs of collaboration: certain details in the composition have been attributed to Filippino Lippi, the pupil who worked closely alongside Botticelli through much of the 1470s^[1]. As with several of Botticelli's Adoration paintings from this period, the precise division of labour between master and workshop remains a matter of scholarly judgement rather than settled fact.